


The hum of a wire

by IsalaVanDiest



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Eventual Romance, F/M, Future Fic, Oxford, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 11:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IsalaVanDiest/pseuds/IsalaVanDiest
Summary: " 'I can't see that far ahead,' he said, 'It would have to be someone who understands about...I don't think there's anyone like that in my world.' " (The Amber Spyglass)--Will Parry was a quiet man, and Julia loved him for it.--Will Parry, through the eyes of a classmate at university (Oxford, of course).





	The hum of a wire

*****

Will Parry was a quiet man, and Julia loved him for it.

She had noticed him early in their first year of university, leaning against the wall in the common room of the college, so still and silent that he seemed to wish for nothing more than complete invisibility. His stillness was the hum of a wire. He was a shadow whose coolness she wanted to stand in.

There were plenty of people standing as he did, huddled against the side of the room, but only he was calm and gazing firmly ahead, so he didn't look nervous or shy like everyone else skirting the centre. He looked like a man whose thoughts were elsewhere.

Julia was holding a plastic cup of rum punch and she hadn't drunk enough of it yet to feel brave, and she hadn't met him at all, didn't even know his name, so with a last sidelong glance she turned to the girls she had come in with, and absorbed herself in their conversation, as much as possible. Every now and then she shifted a little to look at him again, so preoccupied with something she couldn't see or name. She played with the necklace she always wore, running her fingers down the egdes, turning it this way and that as she juggled her attention between her friends and the drink and the men speaking to her and the man whose attention she so dearly wished to attract.

She wasn't the only one. He was handsome, with his dark hair and straight deep brows and firm serious eyes. Julia wasn't the only one who had noticed him and not the only one who was imagining stroking that jaw, tracing the outline of those firmly closed lips with her fingers, teasing them apart with one kiss, then another.

Maybe just her.

She didn't speak to him all the night, but just as he was leaving the room, he broke off the conversation he was having with a woman - red hair, blue eyes, slightly displeased expression when he turned away - to speak to her.

"I noticed your necklace. The light caught it when you turned it," he said, looking at her face, his gaze clear and direct. Her hand went to it: it was familiar and dear to her, a large wingspan of gold over which a phrase was etched. "Angel wings."

"Yes." He was standing quite close and his eyes were dark and unwavering.

"What are the words on it?"

She turned the heavy pendant up to his face, so that the light glinted over the lettering, to show him.

"Useless work versus useless toil," she said, willing her eyes not to dart over his face but to stay as true and clear as his. "It's from William Morris."

" 'It is our nature to take pleasure in work'," he said, and nodded. For a moment, his hand moved as if he was going to touch her pendant, so close to her throat.

The girl he was with shifted slightly closer, bumping into him, and his attention slid from Julia to her, like a beam of light shining down a road at night.

He said good night and she said it back, automatically. He'd left the room before she realised she'd not asked him his name.

*****

Just before the start of second year, she cut her hair. It had been a hot summer and it was liberating to watch the split dried stalks fall like hay on the hairdresser's chequered tiles and feel the listless breeze on the back of her newly bare neck.

She was trying not to think too much about Will Parry, who in the last few weeks before summer had started going out with Sally Meyer, who had very black hair tied back in a long tight braid and, like Will, was a medical student. It was something foolish, but it wouldn't do, she had told herself repeatedly over the summer, to dwell on it like a schoolgirl crush. And yet her summer had passed like so many during her schooldays, as she divided her time between her off-and-on summer jobs and her sketchbook, pining quietly for the company of someone who wouldn't remember her, occasionally accompanying her father to an archive or helping him prepare for his summer schools. He drilled her on Greek, as ever, and Latin declensions, as if he still hoped she was going to say the Fine Arts degree was a mistake after all and she was going to do Greats as he'd so silently, obviously, wanted. 

But still when she saw Will walking across her in the corridor, with his firm even tread and his fixed dark eyes, she could hear the loud catch of her breath in her throat and she felt the long sinuous trickle of sweat down her back - she was over-dressed, it was a warm autumn. He looked up to pass her, raising his head to give his characteristic nod, but his eyes focus and suddenly he started and stopped right there, and reached for her arm.

There were people moving around them, some of them still carrying boxes, and his fingertips fell short of her forearm. Despite the heat he was wearing a long jumper, the sleeve wrapped carefully around his hand with the mutilated fingers.

"Julia," he said, and although they'd spoken a dozen times over the last year she couldn't arrest the beam of her smile when she realised he remembered - no, _knew_ \- her name. "You cut your hair."

She reached up her hand self-consciously and ran it down the smooth sleek cap of gold, twirling the ends round her fingertip. She was struggling to find something to say, but he stepped back, smiling, his eyes strangely wary.

"I didn't recognise you for a moment," he said, and his eyes searched her face, serious and penetrating. "You looked like someone else - someone I knew."

"Well," she said, "I hope you like it" and she was annoyed, because it should have been said archly with her eyes slanted, half-closed, and her mouth twisted in a secretive smile. but instead she spoke seriously looking straight into his face, and he took a moment before he answered.

"I do, actually. It suits you."

*****

In their first year people had still been wary around each other; second year was for stripping boundaries, testing new intimacies, shredding secrets. Julia had two lovers that year, men she liked in an uncomplicated way and who she didn't grieve over when they lost contact. By the second term the atmosphere in the college was feverish, everyone overworked and overheated in the common room, where they read and wrote silently night after night. The room was mostly heated by a working wood fireplace, and the dry hot air it threw off crackled throughout the room. Occasionally, sparks would shoot into the air and burn the skin of those too close by.

Sometimes when the silence was so heavy that the tap of keys or the scratch of pen to paper sounded loud as gunshots, and the fire had dried their skin to paper under their itching winter clothes, Robert Black would stand up and start roaming the room. He was a sulky, discontented geographer who had begun to hate his own subject some time in first year yet lacked the energy to change it. When he started to pace the room it was like opening a window to the wolves and the wild. He would stop in front of someone, and snap closed the book in front of them, and ask questions. He was good at asking them: relentless, tactless. It didn't feel good, to be the centre of his attention, but it was thanks to him that they all began to know one another: how they found out that Olivia Gwynn-Jones was the daughter of missionaries who had spent many years living in Korea, that John Cole had been a child actor with a starring role in an advert for tinned spaghetti hoops, that Will Parry's father was an explorer who had disappeared on an expedition in the far north shortly after he was born.

Tonight Robert Black's footsteps took him right in front of Julia. She didn't have a textbook to close, so he played instead with the tin box of pencils in front of her. His opening gambit was, however, one she was familiar with. People pretended they didn't like to ask, but they asked anyway.

"So, Julia Deveraux. Are you related to _Professor_ Deveraux? At Emmanuel?"

"He's my father," she said firmly, letting her hair swing over her eyes. She didn't look away from her sketchbook, even though she was feeling off-kilter, and her work hadn't been going smoothly. Irritated, she ripped the page out but didn't crumple it up, which she considered to be a derivative piece of theatrics. 

"Is that how you got in?" 

There was a gasp of nervous laughter from someone nearby, but Julia didn't bother to look up. 

"I don't know. I do Fine Art, not history." She was pressing too hard into the the sketchbook; the mark she'd made would leave an impression through the next few pages.

"Was it an interesting life, to be raised by a scholar?" Rob was leaning over her. He was thin, and his slightly too-long teeth made him look hungry even when he was eating.

"It...was uneventful," she said, sketching a small ferret in the corner of the sketchbook. The art professors were slightly fed up, she knew, with her fondness of drawing small woodland creatures. "I think it would be, considering he's a medievalist whose magnum opus is called Navigating Ecclesiastical Hierarchies." There was a murmur of laughter around the room at this and Julia felt slightly disloyal. In fact Navigating Ecclesiastical Hierarchies was considered path-breaking among 12th-century theological historians. 

"Really, though, I mean, is there actually anything sexier and bloodier and more power-hungry than the history of the _church_?" said Rob, who was a founding member of the Atheist and Humanist Society and liked to shoehorn this angle into almost any discussion. 

"I have really never given it much thought," Julia said, firmly, even though thinking about her father and his research and Rob's question brought her back to a holiday when she was thirteen - a research trip, really, disguised. Her father had taken her to Vatican City and spent most days in their archive while she walked up and down the streets. It was no place for a child, even one as sensible and easily entertained as herself. It was so hot that the air had shimmered and in the bubbling heat she had seen figures coalescing, great winged creatures who rippled like the rainbows of an oil slick and grappled silently with each other. She'd spent an afternoon seated on the edge of the Maderno fountain, the money her father had given her to buy ice cream forgotten. Amidst the chattering of the tourists she had heard the faint dim clash of celestial swords, and behind it the faint troubling hum of a great and dangerous machine that made the blood in her body run the wrong way. When her father came out of the archives, rubbing his eyes, she told him, and he took her to the hospital, fearing heatstroke. They made her drink ice water and sit in the shade and her father started leaving the archive early to sit with her in St Peter's Square and play travel Scrabble. Gradually the sounds had receded. 

On their last day there had been a soft breeze, and a little rain, and the mist of it was like a soft clean curtain, and for a moment she had imagined a forest full of red-barked trees and horned creatures moving in their shade, golden in the pouring light.

Dimly she was aware that Robert had moved on and was interrogating someone else, and she was also aware that she'd finished, without noticing, her sketch. It was - she held it away from her to look at it with some perspective - quite good, even though she'd had almost no awareness of what strokes her pencil was making on the page as she sank into the memories of that summer.

Behind her someone sprang up, and suddenly, almost, completely silently, Will was at her side. She started. 

"What have you drawn?" he said, sharply, his finger jabbing accusingly at the paper. His voice was low and people weren't looking at them, but the anger on his face frightened her.

"I - I - don't know. It's just something I was - seeing in front of me." She pressed her lips together hard to stop the shake in her voice. How to explain where her mind went sometimes as she drew, like a bucket down a deep dark well, plunging into the cool wet shadows, bringing up strange and unknown things from the depths that she hadn't recognised, or known existed? You either knew the feel of it or you didn't, the slippery creatures you brought to light with strokes of the pencil or brush. She stuttered over the words. 

"Who is she, then, to you? Where does she live?"

It was a somewhat unremarkable young woman of their age - lively face, slight frown of concentration, long skirt, holding a compass. Julia hadn't yet drawn NESW to mark the points and for some reason she'd given it two hands, a long and a short, over its plain undecorated face. The girl was standing in front of a heavy doorway, and there was a long ferret-like creature at her feet.

"It's just from my head, Will," she said gently. "She's not real." 

He touched the sketch with his fingertips, plaintive, and they came away grey with graphite dust.

Impulsive, she ripped it out of the book and handed it to him.

"You can have it, if you like it," she said, and he looked at it and her so oddly she thought he'd refuse. But then it took it, holding it with great reverence at the edges so as not to smudge any more of the pencil marks.

A few weeks later, she passed Will's bedroom just as he was leaving it. Through the open door, she saw the sketch she'd made, now framed, on his bedside table. 

*****

She felt the cool of the night air steal over her, still chilly at this time of night despite the approaching summer. The day had been bright and warm and now she lay gazing up into the transparent sky, grass tickling through her formal dress under her back, the stars as bright and clear, grains of glittering sand in the velvet of the night. Behind the bushes the murmur of voices, singing merrily and giggling. It was June and the days had melted into one, the end of exams and the succession of inappropriately-named May Balls and warm white wine on parched lawns turning the days as soft and fuzzy as dandelion down. 

Footsteps on the grass, and she propped herself up on one elbow to look up.

"Will," she said, surprised.

He came down and sat beside her and, after a few moments, she settled back down to lie on her back. She was conscious, now, of his eyes on her, of the creases in her dress, even of Sally, inside in her pink gown, as if she could sense the girl searching for her lover. Julia tried to ignore these things, and looked up firmly at the stars.

Will slid down to lie beside her.

Their fingers were touching and she pressed her palm down into the grass to check the urge to close the distance between them and take his hand in hers. Sally, in her layers of pink tissue, navigating the ballroom in her white satin heels, did not deserve that. 

Wanting something to say, to fill the heavy sweet silence, she said without turning her head:

"Do you ever look up at the stars and think of all the different worlds out there, ones we'll never see or reach or even know about?"

He jolted and sat up ever so slightly, to look at her properly. She risked meeting his eyes and was as always started by the clarity of his gaze, searching her face now, as if anxiously.

"Yes," he said finally, looking up as well, "I often think about them." There were shadows in his face, as if she'd struck him.

She tried teasing.

"Maybe you should have been a philosopher," she offered, keeping her tone as light as possible, though it quivered and they both noticed. "Instead of a doctor. If you wanted to think about all these other worlds and their endless possibilities."

Silence. She could hear the sound of his breathing, so close to her. She could pull herself up and touch his face and his eyes and his mouth, all so dear to her, in an instant if she wished, which she did, very much. So Julia pressed herself even harder into the ground, fingers fisting the long green spikes of grass that grew here.

"What I want is to do good," Will finally told her, "And help others do good. It seems I can do that better with medicine as with philosophy."

Will and Julia were undergraduates, and it was not uncommon for sentiments such as Will's to be expressed - by students handing out leaflets or studying politics or raising money through strange wild stunts. But Julia was impressed by the quiet in Will's voice as he said it, the steady determination, the conviction. She knew he would do it and wished she could tell him so without him knowing that - knowing - 

So instead she returned to the subject of other worlds.

"Imagine there's another Oxford," she suggested, "Right on top of this one, like two pieces of tracing paper; and though it's right on top of us, this other Oxford - all around us really - we can't ever reach it and no one from there can ever reach us." She reached out her arm into the air and moved it through. "We're cut off forever, living our lives as they live theirs, without knowing."

Will had sat up, and had Julia looked she would have seen the anguish in his suddenly pale face, how he bit his lip to hold back the ferocious pain in his chest. But she didn't. She looked at her fingers, white and smooth against the blackness above her head, tracing patterns in the warm night.

"And - and maybe in that Oxford there's another Will," said Julia, and she was being the bravest she'd ever been. "And he lives there with all the people of that other Oxford, and maybe - "

"I need to go inside," he said, and he was up on his feet and walking back, the damp grass clinging to his suit, before she could do more than pull hersef up, bewildered, to watch his swift retreat.

" - maybe there, there's another Julia," she whispered, finishing her thought. "And maybe in that other Oxford she and that other Will - "

But then Julia pulled herself together, and stood up and brushed her dress down, and went back to join her fellow students on the lawn.

*****

She might never have spoken to him again, after that humiliation, except that he walked into her - literally - in the Botanic Garden two weeks later.

It was midday and the heat was already taking on that clammy, heavy feeling that made her long every year for September, with its new-sharpened-pencil smell and whispering breezes. She was sprawled out on the grass near the footbridge. She had a book, and a sketchbook, and her phone, but she wasn't doing anything, just watching as people passed lazily over the bridge. It was a weekday and the colleges were empty, so the gardens were fairly quiet. Light rippled on the clogged water and she closed her eyes against the glare. Faintly, the brisk, determined tread of steps over the footbridge came like a jolt through the heavy tranquil scene, and when she looked Will's dark hair and way of walking and his green shirt stained with a little sweat at the back were unmistakeable.

She was comfortable and torpid on the grass, but curiosity won out, after a while, though she moved languidly, conscious of not wanting to be seen rushing even though there was no one she knew nearby. Well, she had every right to cross the footbridge to walk to the end of the garden, she thought, even as she held her body carefully and swung her bag lightly to show the world how very casual she was being. 

He was already out of sight, she had taken so long, and she traced the perimeter of the garden, wondering if maybe he'd walked out through the other side, when she saw him, hidden in the lush green thicket of a tree with low hanging branches. He was sitting, very straight and still, with eyes closed, on a small wooden bench underneath. His lips were moving, very slightly, as if he were speaking to someone only he could see.

The years had fallen from his face and it was like looking at a stricken child, face screwed up against some unwanted truth, nostrils flared. Although it was broad daylight and people were moving slowly in the garden his face looked utterly naked and she was embarrassed and stepped away, so that if he opened his eyes he wouldn't see her looking. When she glanced back, his lips were still moving but his face had relaxed a little. As she watched, he lifted his fisted hand to his cheek and wiped under his eyes with his knuckles.

Julia pushed away back and stopped at the footbridge, leaning over to look down at the water hyacinths and the patterns of the algal bloom and the murky swimming fish. She must have stood there in her confused daze for some time, and might have stayed there longer had someone's shoulder not clipped her as he walked past.

"I'm sorry," said Will, automatically, and his face cleared a little when he recognised her. "Oh. Hi."

It was so normal, after he'd walked away from her so abruptly earlier that month, although he was eyeing her warily, eyes on her mouth and her bare shoulders and her hands wrapped around her elbows. They fell to walking together, talking inconsequentially.

"I didn't realise you stayed in Oxford so long," she said finally. He shrugged and he thought he'd dismiss it, but he seemed to weigh over his answers before speaking.

"I like to come here in the summer. The Botanic Garden is quite special to me - it helps me remember someone I used to know who's not...here...anymore." His hands curled into fists and he noticed and relaxed them consciously. She watched him straighten out his fingers, a sleeve wrapped around the fingers of one hand, as ever. 

"I'm sorry about that."

"It was...well, it feels like it was a long time ago," he said, quietly. "But it's something I'm going to have to do until I die, you know, to remember her. Because she'll never not be important to me." He looked sharply at her and she flushed under his gaze, intense and fixed even though they were both walking quite briskly, and it felt like a conversation he should be having with someone else, not with her. She thought of Sally, with her dark hair and serious mouth and flashing eyes and her unexpected fondness for pastel colours. When Sally saw Will, she would rush over to meet him, and slide her hand through his arm, and if he was talking to another girl she kissed him openly on the mouth. Despite her jealous guarding, Julia had heard that Sally herself liked to flirt...she dismissed the unkind thought. But still, Julia could not imagine Sally accepting this statement gently.

"I understand," she said, thinking of her father, and how he grieved her mother after their divorce as surely as if she'd died. When she looked back at Will his smile was warm.

*****

Third year, after finals, and those of them graduating filled their days doing the things they'd had three years to do but never had bothered with before. But Oxford was Julia's home and she did not walk the golden sun-filled streets with the same sweet melancholic nostalgia as her friends, who occasionally burst into slightly panicked pronouncements that this was the last time they'd do this - whatever this was - in the days before the all packed up and dispersed to the jobs and internships they'd acquired through blood and tears and sweat and, sometimes, family connections. 

And parties. Long days of drinking wine arm in arm in the parks and evenings stretched out in someone's flat, eating flavoured tortilla chips with chive-flecked sour cream and indifferent store-bought brownies. It was different for Julia, and for her fellow graduates who were staying on for an MPhil, and the medical students with years to go still, but they all gathered together and talked until the sky began to turn pink at the edges and they were sticky with cake crumbs and drunk from the free-poured spirits. 

The three years that had passed had not dulled the sharp faint pain whenever she saw Will Parry, and she looked up whenever he walked in. She knew, by now, that people had noticed it, how her body gravitated to him like the needles of a compass finding north. He never seemed to notice himself, although he greeted her with his usual warmth whenever he saw her. She liked to think his smile and his eyes lingered more after Sally had split up with him but - then - it was easy to read too much into these things.

The last party of the year, really the last one, was in her friend Anais' flat, and Julia had been put in charge of slicing a traybake Anais had made. She was scoring the cake into long thin bars with her sharp knife when Will walked into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. The living room was loud and hot but the kitchen, with its wide open window, was cool and still, although people came in and out for food and drink and napkins. He leaned with his back to the sink, watching her cut up the cake into even cubes without saying anything.

She put down the platter of cakes and stood next to him. Their shoulders were touching, but only just. At one point her fingertips even lightly brushed against his hand; embarrassed, she pulled away with a murmured apology, pushing her fingers through her hair. He smiled at her, a slow gentle thing. She wanted to cry. She wanted to be brave and fold her fingers through his. Even more than that she wanted him to want to touch her as much as she wanted to touch him. For him to turn and hold her in front of everyone shifting in and out of the kitchen. Despite the activity there was stillness here, and the dancing bodies writhing, visible through the open doorway, were like creatures from another world. 

And it had been long enough, three years of watching and wanting him, and she picked up a square of the cake and with shaking fingers, brought it to his mouth.

He pulled away, in front of everyone in the kitchen, and the cake fell to the floor. Julia pulled her hand back as if his mouth was burning, pulling away. But he caught his breath and pulled her hand back to him.

"You startled me," he said, although there was something deep in his eyes which said it wasn't only that. But then in front of everyone he turned her palm to his lips and pressed his mouth there for a long moment, holding her hand firmly, although she would never have withdrawn.

When he let her go Julia was conscious of people around her smirking, and a whispered _oh finally_ , too loud even against the backdrop of muffled music from the other room. So she leaned her head against his shoulder for a moment, and he hesitated briefly before moving his arm around her waist. 

When she looked back up to him his smile was slow and sweet and warm and she felt hers answer in kind.

She didn't say anything, and neither did he. She hadn't expected him to. Will Parry was a quiet man, after all. She loved him for it.


End file.
